Karl W. Butzer: Interdisciplinary mentor.

As his students in geography, archaeology, geology, and Latin American, African, and Middle Eastern Studies attest, you could learn more in one day in the field with Karl Butzer than you could in a semester-long course with any other professor. Karl’s fieldwork and active teaching endedMay 4, 2016. Future generations of students will learn fromKarl bymeans of his 15 books and monographs, and more than 275 journal articles and chapters in edited volumes. Blending nuanced insights of human–environment relationships on the individual and societal levels with a keen understanding of earth-shaping process, Karl will be forever known as the founder of geoarchaeology and a contemporary champion of the concept of human adaptation to the environment. Reflected in his professional life, Karl’s personal life involved a difficult past, a rich present, and an optimistic eye toward the future. Born to a Catholic family in Mülheim an der Ruhr on August 19, 1934, Karl and his brother were smuggled out of Nazi Germany in 1937, reunited with their parents in England, and settled as a family in Montreal, Canada. There Karl found solace in Thoreau-like places, even composing at age 14 a poem titled Seven Springs, one verse of which reads: